Field of the Invention
The present invention is related to a wireless communication system supporting Bluetooth communication and more specifically, a method and an apparatus for controlling a camera by using Bluetooth communication.
Discussion of the Related Art
Bluetooth is one of typical short range wireless technologies for exchanging information among various devices such as smart phones, PCs, earphones, and headphones. Bluetooth technology is now adopted by most of smart phones, PCs, and notebooks; and is widely used for the convenience of use. The easy pairing process of Bluetooth technology provides reliable connectivity among different devices. A recent Bluetooth variant LE is capable of providing hundreds of kilobytes of information reliably while requiring considerably reduced power consumption.
The Bluetooth Core Specification comprises BR/EDR (Basic Rate/Enhanced Data Rate) and LE (Low Energy) version.
Of the two versions, Bluetooth Low Energy (in what follows, it is called ‘BLE’) is a subset of Bluetooth Specification v4.0, aimed for high energy efficiency compared with the former Bluetooth specifications.
As Bluetooth technology is increasingly adopted for controlling devices on Wireless Personal Area Networks (WPANs), a camera control technology based on Bluetooth is also being widely used. The smart phone function for controlling a digital camera is one of typical examples.
However, current camera control technologies are unilateral, providing only the camera control function (such as still image picture, video recording start & stop, and pan/tilt/zoom control), and there is no other way for a camera to send information to a smartphone.